Another voice: Walmart is respecting the nation's past

Published 6:30 am, Tuesday, February 1, 2011

It was the first time that Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee faced each other on the field of battle, and the outcome of the Civil War hung in the balance.

Their first meeting was in an area just west of Chancellorsville, Va., known as the Wilderness for its thick forests and tangled underbrush. It was at Chancellorsville almost exactly a year before that Lee scored perhaps his greatest victory when his "right arm," Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson led his Second Corps on a 14-mile forced march around the main Union force, striking the federal right flank in the twilight hours of May 2, 1863. Jackson's brilliance and determination turned the tide of the battle, but at a terrible cost to the South.

That night, while checking on the battle lines, Jackson mistakenly was shot in the left arm and hand by his own men. His death from pneumonia a few days later was a loss from which the South would not recover.

In the Wilderness, for two days, the forces of Grant and Lee fought under the most difficult conditions. In places, the brush caught fire, burning those unable to escape.

Neither side could gain the advantage and the battle was a draw. For the first time in the war, however, the Union army did not sit idle while the Confederates withdrew to the east. Instead, Grant urged his army forward, ever forward, beginning his "Overland Campaign" that eventually would lead to Appomattox Court House and the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia 11 months later.

For more than a century, the battlefields at Chancellorsville and the Wilderness remained rural, visited by Americans interested in our past, but left virtually unchanged.

But then, like many cities, Fredericksburg, 12 miles to the east — scene of its own horrific battle of the war — began growing, particularly to the west. Communities and subdivisions sprang up, putting pressure on the twin battlefields in a scenario familiar throughout the boundaries of America's great War Between the States.

Several years ago, Walmart announced it would build a supercenter in the middle of the Wilderness battlefield, on land not owned by the government.

Preservationists were horrified and began efforts to thwart the company. Despite loud protests, Orange County, Va., supervisors granted Walmart a permit to build the store, but a coalition of organizations filed suit to prevent construction.

Finally, on Wednesday, Walmart officials, listening to the pleas of people who cherish our nation's history, announced the company would not build at that site, instead moving the location of its supercenter to a less historically sensitive area.

Of course, the original location remains available for development, but Walmart is to be praised for deciding not to build there. It still can have a successful supercenter not that far away — and the Wilderness will continue as hallowed ground, a place to remember the almost 29,000 Americans on both sides who died, were wounded or went missing in two days of hell almost 147 years ago.